1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, device, and method for providing recommendation information concerning various types of content, such as music content and audio/visual (AV) content, which have become abundantly provided through various recording media and through communication media such as the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
There have been many proposed methods for selecting or recommending a piece of content that matches user's preference from a very large number of provided pieces of content, such as music data provided in a form recorded on compact discs (CDs), AV data provided in a form recorded on digital versatile discs (DVDs), and, in addition, various types of content provided through networks such as the Internet.
For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2000-048046 discloses a technology in which, in response to tendencies of interests and preferences of a user (customer) who requests a service, corresponding service information (e.g., a recommended CD list, etc.) is provided. In addition, web sites that use the Internet to sell and purchase goods employ methods such as recommending content by referring to a user's past-purchase history and purchase trends of others who are similar in purchase tendency to the user.
In other words, by storing, in units of users, user information such as information of the results of questionnaires in the past, and goods-purchase-history information, and analyzing the stored user information to analyze interests and preference tendencies of the users, for each user, content that matches the user's interest and preference is selected and recommended.